Hermetically Sealed

Anyone who reads this blog (all 12 of you!) may have noticed that I have moved the front page and blog around and have added some new pages. Changes are coming!

Basically, I am going to turn this site into more of a creativity platorm and not just a personal blog. I have added a page to sell my art and will soon be adding an amazon widget to sell my book and other stuff. It’s not really about making money (whatever! I wanna get paid!) but it really has to do with wanting to stretch my wings a little and get my stuff out there.

It’s been years since I made art for money. Back in the day when I was just 20 I would paint on cheap canvases and set up on the streets of downtown Little Rock or in Eureka Springs during the art spree, hoping I could make an extra $50 for supplies. Sometimes I made money and sometimes I made a LOT of money and sometimes I came home on fumes with both of my pockets full of dirty pennies and lint.

I see people selling art all over the internet. Some of it is very good but a great deal of it is terrible and fuck it, if people can make some change doing their thing then so can I.

Onward Soldier, into the fires of war…or at least the art market.

I was going to write a very emo intro including the lead lyric from Aaliyah’s song “Try Again”…”Been a long time, I shouldn’ta left you without a dope beat to step to…”

It was going to be something wonderful about how my trusty journal is my dying salvation in a world of crazy but I stopped myself, thinking that Aaliyah wouldn’t appreciate the defilement.

Still, it resonates…”If at first you don’t succeed…You can dust yourself off and try again..” Those words have never been truer than in the past few months where sweeping changes have entered my orbit and slapped the face of the happy and oblivious child hanging haphazardly from the chipped paint railing of life’s merry go round.

I stepped away from my journal, my art, my writing, myself over the last several months like a dope fiend chasing their next high. Only mine are often made of chaotic lists and things that Must Be Done Now! Hours cram-packed with obligations, filling the needs of people, etc. I pulled the shade on feeling anything so that I could feel nothing (with VIGOR!) for the last 6 months. It was safe and the perfect battery for a zombie-like trance lasting from January until now.

I’ve been happy, joyful even, the entire time without many of those numb moments of nothing. I’m still connected and engaged to most everything but the part of me that craved creativity was left to die in a carrot field.

So my body crashed. Hard. WITH VIGOR! I got the “WHOOP! WHOOP!” of the wake-up call loud and clear and have to heed the warning of Helga, the charge nurse when she says, “The chaos? You vil do eet no more!”

Slow. Slowly. Slower still. It has slowed to a crawl and finally a stop and here I am with Aaliyah telling me to “dust myself off and try again”.

I will, Aaliyah, only this time I will keep safe the woman who knows how to drive the speed limit.

My home is beautiful and comfortable. Everything organized, neat, clean, and decorated to my tastes. I’ve been walking from room to room, leaning in the doorways while I gaze out on walls painted a color that I picked out and paintings hung in spots that I picked.

I’ve also been cooking a lot of wonderful food lately, chock full of fresh vegetables and exotic ingredients. Decadence.

I’m happy.

I will call him every day for the rest of his life.

I have ideas. SO many ideas. Things I want to make, books I want to write, websites I want to build. I am literally burping creativity because my belly is swirling with the acidic, needy muse-juice that I so desperately crave. And yet, it won’t digest and propagate through my marrow properly because that requires time and energy and I have neither.

Because when you are as busy as I am, sunning myself by the glow of the canvas while the gulls of creativity call in the moonlight will simply never happen. Always something to fix, someone to feed, somewhere to be. And it never stops.

I get as far as the idea and like a big dummy standing at a fork in a road, I rut the ground with my feet rather than moving to the left or right where a canvas might actually get painted or verse might actually get written. It’s a veritable hooch-smoking caterpillar handing out a magic cookie. One makes you responsible, one makes you happy. But you can’t be both. Ever. Or the world might implode. Or just your head.

I moved into my new office tonight and made a promise to myself that I would start blogging more, painting more, musing more, and basically doing more of everything that feels good and right and less of the things that don’t make anyone happy, much less me. Like, I don’t think I’ll vacuum every 2 days anymore. I’ve stepped in dog hair before and can do it again (FOR UP TO A WEEK AT A TIME, WEEEE!) Because what’s a clean house and an organized pantry except proof that you bend and reach?

I’d rather have proof that I dug my nails into acrylics or that I thought out a story so epic and long that Stephen King himself would pucker in his rectal area. I’d rather be called a selfish naval-gazing eccentric than a good housewife and I’d rather get called that right now, rather than 30 years from now when I probably won’t be able to hear it anyway.

There is an end to my obsessive perfectionism when it comes to organizing the house. It’s now.

Let the era of sloppy paint, imperfect verse, and mirrors begin! WEE!

I was sitting in a Cracker Barrel restaurant yesterday mulling over a plate of chicken and the recent earthquake in Japan. People were fresh from church and clinking forks against plates, on iPhones, and chattering away.

It hit me that we revolve on such a micro level most of the time. We eat at restaurants and maybe bitch about how they burned the bread and maybe on our way out, we grab a mint. We stop at a gas station for s slurpee where there are random and chaotic displays of crap that nobody really needs. We watch crap on TV, we spend mindless hours on the internet arguing with people we don’t know or buying more random shit that we don’t have room for anyway.

All the plastic knick-nacks. All the “reality” tv shows. All of the petty arguing that people do.

And meanwhile in Japan, people are floating in water, dead, or hovered in the doorways of destroyed homes. They are looking through rubble for water and food or trying to find the daughter who was ripped from their arms when the water came. They are walking around in floating radiation, not yet knowing that they are contaminated. They are forever changed.

When I think of the macro, the large scale “bigness” of what has happened in Japan, Im getting angrier and angrier about the senselessness of it all. How people are still on Facebook playing farmville, griping about their jobs, or, if you are incredibly mentally ill and mean, still trying to cyber-bully someone who did nothing to you except expose your fake Cancer-scheme as bullshit while you scammed, lied, and manipulated people without a second thought.

Because micro people don’t live in the macro. Nothing is bigger than they are, therefore nothing else matters.

I reject it. I reject Perez Hilton and who is wearing what at the Oscars. I reject reality television. I reject plastic souvenirs and tchotchkes. I reject wasting time on the micro when life is so much bigger than that.

We are magic and stardust and light; even our very fingernails are made of comet glitter.

There are a lot of sickos hiding out in religion. Look at religious sects who have polyamory or plural marriage as part of their covenant. Nowhere else in the United States will you find a man living with 5 women, having children with all of them, and living in a form of a compound where people won’t turn their heads until he says “I’m a Mormon.”

Remember Tony Alamo? What about David Koresh? Jim Jones? All religious nuts who had underage girls for their sexual playthings. In my opinion, they were handled with kid gloves because they pulled out the old “sexual purity” card and made it the “Voice of God” that instructed them to take a 12-year-old girl as their wife.

Think about those creepy “Purity” Balls. *shiver*

And don’t even get me started on the boy-molesting Catholic Priest cover ups.

My point is that sexual deviants hide out in religion because it’s a nice soft bed for sickos of all kinds. I don’t know many (if any) women who have not been sexually brutalized, dominated, or compromised in some form or fashion at the hands of “religion”.

For the Bible tells me so.

When Will Women Learn?

When will women learn
that the value of our being
is not in our bodies
That the dreams that we hold close
are not meant to be gobbled up
by the insatiable hunger of others.

When will women learn
that we are not defined by
how clean our house is
how tight our pussy is
how hard we wring our hands
when we try to figure out how to fix
the entire fucking world.

When will women learn
that our tears do not indicate weakness
that our legs do not instigate rape
that the soft pallet of our heart
is not a mother fucking trampoline
for Butches or men or bosses or Fathers
who would rather crash down upon us
than look within us
or listen to us
or fear us.

When will women learn
that we damn ourselves when we damn each other,
that those unbearably beautiful daughters
are not our whipping girls
that we are not afforded the luxury of
“I’m sorry”
when we rip out the heart of our sister
or tap-dance across her life
because we can’t hear our own music.

When will women learn
that our life is not a detail,
that we are not meant to live
in feint whispers or mealy sighs
that we were born to crash and burn
against the shores of the institution
that we were born to give better to the world
than was given to us
that although we are not it’s savior,
that we have that mother fucking power anyway
and that how we choose to live it or give it
defines us
and defies them
and releases us
and forms a dare within us
to be alive
and alone
and ugly
and old
and imperfect
and loud
and raging
and fat
and the very definition of what the world denies us

When will women learn? That we are not someone’s “plus one” on an invitation, that we aren’t the queen of their doublewide trailer, that just because we may be somebody’s mother that we arent’ everyone’s mother. When will women learn?

When will women learn? That being born with a pussy means that eventually someone is going to want to fill it up? That we are taught from birth that our unwhole, unholy, unwashed, unkempt selves need to be fixed with a good dickin’? When will we learn to fuck back when being fucked? When will women learn?
When will women learn
that we are
here and alive
in spite of it all
and that simply by breathing
we break the machine of the world.